Dramatic
Irony (n.) def: insight or
information understood by the audience of a play but not grasped by one or all of the characters within that play.
Teaching my students the myriad meanings and nuances of irony
(in all its forms) is always a challenge. But dramatic irony, for some reason,
always seems the most difficult. So I'll boil it down for you like this:
Dramatic Irony
occurs when a character lacks integral information and as a result makes a bad or
humorous or, at times, serendipitously excellent decision.
For example, in Romeo
and Juliet…hang on. Okay, I’m gonna give the ending away, folks. So if you
haven’t had the time in the last 400 years to update yourself on the outcome of
Shakespeare’s most well-known romantic tragedy, I’m about to spoil it for you
because you should have spent less time messing around with your Aqua-Doodle or
Mario Brothers video games and more time reading. (Spoiler alert/scolding over—let
us resume, shall we?) In Romeo and Juliet,
Romeo hears that his new wife and love of his life Juliet has died. He rushes
to Juliet’s side to kill himself next to her so he can at least share in her
death since he can’t share in her life—excellent decision-making skills at work
here already. He and his poisonous dram hover over her. Tearfully he declares
how fair she looks—she just doesn’t look dead! Then he drinks his poison. His
corpse falls by Juliet’s body just moments before—gasp!—Juliet wakes up. The
audience has known that Juliet was faking her death in order to be with Romeo
because we were privy to a previous convo between our heroine and good ol’
Friar Lawrence as they plotted her pseudo-demise. Yet Romeo lacked that
pertinent (to say the least) information and so made an ill-informed—and in
this case, fatal—decision.
While this example is extreme—and fictional—I know that we
all have moments of dramatic irony in our own lives. Moments when we discover
information after a decision has been made. And we shake our head (or spew
profanities) and say glumly, “Had I but known.”
As a personal example, while in Spain, I saw a woman wearing
the most hideously atrocious dress I’ve ever clapped eyes on in my life. Duct
tape or a bedazzled lampshade would have been better alternatives for her to
wear rather than this thing. But she wore it and pranced down Las Ramblas as
proudly as ever. Up to this point I had been in Spain several weeks and was
used to being able to speak in English and have the luxury of very few people actually
understanding me. (I must also add, as a caveat, that I was quite young—seventeen,
or so. So I was an idiot.) Anyway, when
I saw her, and when the initial blinding pain from the sight of her had passed,
I turned to a friend of mine and said in English, “I don’t care that this is
Barcelona, that woman has no business wearing that in public.”
My friend snorted and we passed by her, only to hear a voice
behind us say, “Oh, you’re Americans too?” Yes, that woman was American and
understood perfectly my untimely insult. Had I but known she was American and
could understand me, I would have kept my mouth shut and nursed my scorched eyes
back to health in silence. Yet only afterward was I privy to some pertinent
information. Thus another notch was added to my belt of Putting-My-Foot-In-It.
Now, in some cases, we say “Had I But Known” as we are awash
in a wave of relief. “Had I but known how high that mountain really was, I
never would have tried to climb it—but I’m so glad I did!” (Unfortunately not a
true story.)
We, sadly, are not granted the luxury of knowing the specific
outcome of our decisions. (Although we should by now be able to determine natural
consequences—i.e. step in front of a bus = flattened by said bus.) Nor are we
able to know all the time the full body of information needed to make fully informed
decisions. This limitation at times leaves us with regret, at times with
thankfulness, and at times with a stinkin’ hilarious story to tell at parties
or at family gatherings or on our blogs where we already know there is
little-to-no self-dignity left to preserve anyway, so why not entertain the
masses with our humiliation.
Therefore, I am taking a page from Kate’s blog play book over
at Nested, and starting a series. I invented a theme. I created a meme. (That
rhymes!) A Downton Abbey meme, of course. Because it’s my blog and because I
cannot get enough of these loveable Brits. And occasionally I’ll be sharing a
personal encounter with dramatic irony, or I’ll be asking others of my
acquaintance (real, cyber, or otherwise) to share their own dramatically ironic
experiences. Because, let’s face it, we’ve all had them. And either we can get
a good laugh or we can learn from it. (Except for Romeo because he pretty much
limited his opportunity to learn when he killed himself.) And the best part is
that we get to do our living, laughing, and learning together!
So be on the lookout for Lord Grantham’s voice (along with
the rest of the cast of Downton Abbey) to echo through the blogsphere:
Had I But
Known!
